The Sam Gunn Omnibus (25 page)

Raki groped with one hand toward
the intercom on his desk, still facing the strange intruder.

“Never mind calling security,” the
man said. “I’m on your side, pal. I can help you.”

“Help me? I don’t need—”

“The hell you don’t need help! They’re
waiting for you upstairs,” he

cast
his eyes toward the ceiling, “with knives sharpened and a vat of boiling oil.
All for you.”

“What
do you mean?”

The
man smiled, a lopsided sort of grin in his round, snub-nosed face.

“You
think you’re gonna waltz right in there and take control of the corporation,
huh? You think the CEO’s just gonna bend over and let you boot him in the butt?”

“What
do you know about it?”

“Plenty,
pal,” said the little man. “I was never the guy for corporate politics. Had no
time for boards of directors and all the crap that goes with a big bureaucracy.
But lemme tell you, they’re out to get you. They’re gonna pin your balls to the
conference table, Raki, old pal.”

Raki
felt his knees giving way. He sank to a half-sitting position on the edge of
his desk.

His
visitor strutted across the carpet, looked out the window. “Nice view. Not as
good as the view from Titan, but what the hell, this is the best you can do in
Florida, I guess.”

“What
did you mean?” Raki asked.

“About
the view from Titan?”

“About
the board of directors. They’re waiting for me upstairs—”

“You
bet your busy little ass they’re waiting. With assorted cutlery and boiling
oil, like I said.”

“You’re
crazy!”

“Mad?”
The little man screwed up his face and crossed his eyes. “Hannibal was mad.
Caesar was mad. And surely Napoleon was the maddest of them all.”

“Talk
sense, dammit!”

The
man chuckled tolerantly. “Look. You’re going up to the board of directors to
tell them that the corporation would be better off with you as CEO instead of
the old fart that’s running the network now. Right?”

“Right,”
said Raki.

“Well,
what’s your plan?”

“My
plan?”

“Yeah.
You need a plan to lay out on the table, a blueprint to show them what changes
you’re gonna make, how you’re gonna do bigger and better things for dear ol’
Solar News.”

“I... I...”
Raki suddenly realized he did not have a plan. Not an idea in his head. He
could feel cold sweat breaking out all over his body.

“C’mon,
c’mon,” the little man demanded, “the board’s waiting. What’s your plan?”

“I
don’t have one!” Raki wailed.

His
visitor shook his head. “Just as I thought. No plan.”

“What
can I do?” Raki was trembling now. He saw his dream of conquest crumbling. They’ll
fire me! I’ll lose everything!

“Not
to worry, pal. That’s why I’m here. To help you.” The little man pulled a
computer disk from his grubby coverall pocket. It was smaller than the palm of
his hand, even though his hand was tiny.

He
handed the disk to Raki. It felt warm and solid in his fingers.

“Show
‘em that, pal. It’ll knock ‘em on their asses.”

Before
Raki could think of anything to say, he was standing at the foot of the long,
long conference table. The entire board of directors was staring at him from
their massive chairs. The old CEO and his henchmen sat up near the head of the
table, flanking the chairman of the board, a woman upon whom Raki had lavished
every possible attention. She was smiling at him, faintly, but the rest of the
board looked grim.

“Well,”
snapped the CEO, “what do you have there in your hand, young man?”

Raki
took a deep breath. “I hold here in my hand,” he heard his own voice saying,
smoothly, without a tremor, “the salvation of Solar News.”

A
stir went around the conference table.

Holding
up the tiny disk, Raki went on, “This is a documented, dramatized biography of
one of the solar system’s most colorful personalities—the late Sam Gunn.”

The
board erupted into an uproar.

“Sam
Gunn!”

“No!”

“It
couldn’t be!”

“How
did you manage it?”

One
of the truly elderly members of the board, frail and pasty-faced, waved his
skeletal hands excitedly. “I have it on very good authority that BBC was
planning to do a biography of Sam Gunn. You’ve beaten them to the punch, young
man! Bravo.”

The
chairman turned a stern eye on her CEO. “How come you didn’t do this yourself?”
she demanded of the cowering executive. “Why did Raki have to do this all on
his own?” And she gave Raki a wink full of promise.

The
entire board of directors got to their feet and applauded. Walter

Cronkite
appeared, in a white linen double-breasted suit, to join the acclamation. The
old CEO faded, ghostlike, until he disappeared altogether.

Raki smiled and made a little bow.
When he turned, he saw that Yoni was waiting for him, reclining on a bank of
satin pillows beside a tinkling fountain in a moonlit garden scented by warm
blossoms.

His strange little visitor stepped
out from behind an azalea bush, grinning. “Way to go, pal. Give her everything
you’ve got.”

JADE KNEW THAT
her ploy had failed. Raki had
returned to Orlando two weeks ago, and there was no word from him at all.
Nothing.

She went through her assignments
perfunctorily, interviewing a development tycoon who wanted to build retirement
villages on the Moon, a visiting ecologist from Massachusetts who wanted a moratorium
declared on all further lunar developments, an astrobiologist who was trying to
raise funds for an expedition to the south lunar pole to search for fossilized
bacteria: “I
know
there’s got to be
evidence of life down there someplace; I just know it.”

All the help that Yoni had given
her, all the support that Monica gave, had been for nothing. Jade saw herself
trapped in a cell of lunar stone, blank and unyielding no matter which way she
turned.

Gradowsky warned her. “You’re
sleepwalking, kid. Snap out of it and get me stories I can send to Orlando, not
this high-school junk you’ve been turning in.”

Another week went by, and Jade
began to wonder if she really wanted to stay on as a reporter. Maybe she could
go back to running a truck up on the surface. Or ship out to Mars: they needed
construction workers there for the new base the scientists were building.

When Gradowsky called her in to his
office she knew he was going to fire her.

Jumbo Jim had a strange,
uncomfortable expression on his face as he pushed aside a half-eaten hero
sandwich and a mug of some foaming liquid while gesturing Jade to the chair in
front of his desk.

Swallowing visibly, Gradowsky said,
“Well, you did it.”

Jade nodded glumly. Her last
assignment had been a real dud: the corporate board of Selene City never gave
out any news other than their official media release.

“The word just came in from
Orlando. You leave for Alpha tomorrow.”

It took Jade a moment to realize
what Jumbo Jim was telling her. She felt her breath catch.

“Raki must have fought all the way
up to the board of directors,” Gradowsky was saying. “It must’ve been some
battle.”

Instead of elation, instead of
excitement, Jade felt numb, smothered, encased in a block of ice. I’ve got to make
it work, she told herself. I’ve got to get to every person who knew Sam and make
them tell me everything. I owe it to Monica and Yoni. I owe it to Raki.

She looked past Gradowsky’s fleshy,
flabby face, still mouthing words she did not hear, and realized that Raki had
put his career on the line. And so had she.

THEY FACED EACH OTHER SUSPICIOUSLY,
FLOATING WEIGHTLESSLY
in emptiness.

The black man was tall,
long-limbed, loose, gangling; on Earth he might have made a pro basketball
player. His utilitarian coveralls were standard issue, frayed at the cuffs and
so worn that whatever color they had been originally had long since faded into
a dull gray. They were clean and pressed to a razor sharpness, though. The
insignia patch on his left shoulder said
administration
.
A strictly nonregulation belt of royal blue, studded with rough lumps of meteoric
gold and clamped by a heavy gold buckle, cinched his pencil-thin waist and made
him look even taller and leaner.

He eyed the reporter warily. She
was young, and the slightly greenish cast to her pretty features told him that
she had never been in zero gravity before. Her flame-red hair was shoulder
length, he judged, but she had followed the instructions given to groundlings
and tied it up in a zero-gee snood. Terrific big emerald eyes, even if they did
look kind of scared.

Her coveralls were spanking new
white. She filled them nicely enough, a trim, coltish figure that he almost
admired. She looked like a forlorn little waif floating weightlessly, obviously
fighting down the nausea that was surging through her.

Frederick Mohammed Malone was
skeptical to the point of being hostile toward this female interloper. Jade
could see the resentment smoldering in the black man’s red-rimmed eyes. Malone’s
face was narrow, almost gaunt, with a trim little Vandyke jutting out from his
chin. His forehead was high, receding; his hair was cropped close to the skull.
His skin was very black. She guessed Malone’s age at somewhere in his early
sixties, although she knew that living in zero gravity could make a person look
much younger than his or her calendar age.

She tried to restart their stalled
conversation. “I understand that you and Sam Gunn were, uh, friends.”

“Why’re you doing a story on Sam?”
Malone asked, his voice low and loaded with distrust.

The two of them were in Malone’s “office.”
Actually it was an observation blister in the central hub of space station
Alpha. Oldest and still biggest of the Earth-orbiting commercial stations,
Alpha was built on the old wheels-within-wheels scheme. The outermost rim,
where most of the staff lived and worked, spun at a rate that gave it almost a
full Earth gravity, out-of-bounds for Jade. Two-thirds of the way toward the
hub there was a wheel that spun at the Moon’s one-sixth g. That was where she
was quartered for her visit. The hub itself, of course, was for all practical
purposes at zero-gee, weightless.

Malone’s aerie consisted of one
wall on which were located a semicircular sort of desk and communications
center, a bank of display screens that were all blankly gray at the moment, and
an airtight hatch that led to the spokes that radiated out to the various
wheels. The rest of the chamber was a transparent glassteel bubble from which
Malone could watch the station’s loading dock—and the overwhelming majesty of
the huge, curved, incredibly blue and white-flecked Earth as it slid past
endlessly, massive, brilliant, ever-changing, ever-beautiful.

To Jade, though, it seemed as if
they were hanging in empty space itself, unprotected by anything at all, and
falling, falling, falling toward the ponderous world that filled her peripheral
vision. The background rumble of the bearings that bore the massive station’s
rotation while the hub remained static sounded to her like the insistent bass
growl of a giant grinding wheel that was pressing the breath out of her.

She swallowed bile, felt it burn in
her throat, and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.

She said to Malone, “I’ve been
assigned to do a biography of Mr. Gunn for the Solar News
Network....”

Despite himself, Malone suddenly
chuckled. “First time I ever heard him called
Mr.
Gunn.”

“Oh?” Jade’s microchip recorder,
imbedded in her belt buckle, was already on, of course. “What did the people
here call him?”